“Your hat is on the floor,” Miss Leigh informed Miss Kennard. The girl did not reply; she was looking down upon the keys of her typewriter, and her demeanor suggested that her heart was on the floor, too.
When Lida sat by the open window of her room that evening her depression had become doleful to the point of despair.
The night was unseasonably warm with enervating humidity; in that atmosphere the dormant germs of the girl’s general disgust with the metropolis and all its affairs were incubated. Breathing the heavy air which sulked at the window, she pondered on the hale refreshment of the northern forests. But it seemed to her that there was no honesty in the woods any more. That day, fate searching her out at last, she had been dragged in as a party in a plot against her stricken grandfather. She indulged her repugnance to her employment; it had become hateful beyond all endurance. Her association with the cynical business of the agency and her knowledge of the ethics of Mern had been undermining the foundations of her own innate sense of what was inherently right, she reflected, taking account of stock.
Dispassionately considered, it was not right for her to use her acquired knowledge of the plot against Echford Flagg in order to circumvent the plans of an employer who trusted her. But after a while she resolutely broke away from the petty business of weighing the right and the wrong against each other; she was bold enough to term it petty business in her thoughts and realized fully, when she did so, that her Vose-Mern occupation had damaged her natural rectitude more than she had apprehended.
But there was something more subtle, on that miasmatic metropolitan night, something farther back than the new determination to break away from Mern and all his works of mischief. It was not merely a call of family loyalty, a resolve to stand by the grandfather who had disowned his kin. She was not sure how much she did care for the hard old man of the woods. But right then, without her complete realization of what the subtle feeling was, the avatar of the spirit of the Open Places was rising in her. She longed avidly for the sight and the sound of many soughing trees. She was urged to go to her own in some far place where her feet could touch the honest earth instead of being insulated by the pavements which were stropped glossy by the hurry of the multitude.
That urge really was just as insistent as consideration of the personal elements involved, though she did not admit it, not being able to analyze her emotions very keenly right then. Family affection needs propinquity and service to develop it. Her sentiments in regard to Echford Flagg were vague. This Latisan, whoever he was, was plainly a rough character with doubtful morals who was loyal to a grudge instead of to her grandfather. She knew what the Elsham girl had been able to with other men, in the blasé city; it stood to reason that in the woods, having no rivals to divert the attentions of a victim, Elsham would be still more effective.
At last, having kept her thoughts away from an especial topic because of the shame that still dwelt with her, Lida faced what she knew was the real and greater reason for her growing determination to step between Echford Flagg and his enemies. Alfred Kennard had stolen money from Echford Flagg. Sylvia Kennard had grieved her heart out over the thing. There were the bitter letters which Lida had found among her mother’s papers after Sylvia died. The mother had torn the name from the bottoms of those letters; it was as if she had endeavored to shield Echford Flagg from the signed proof of utter heartlessness.
The debt to Echford Flagg had not been canceled. Could the daughter of Alfred Kennard repay in some degree for the sake of the father? That sense of duty surmounted all qualms involved in the betrayal of an employer, if it could be called betrayal, considering the ethics that had been adopted and preached by Mern.
It was midnight when she reached her firm decision. She would go to the north country. She would do her best, single-handed, as opportunity might present itself. She would fight without allowing her grandfather to know her identity. Perhaps she might tell him when it was all over, if she won. The debt was owed by the father; it might help if it was known that the daughter had paid. Then she would go away; it was not in her mind to gain any favor for herself. If she merely ran to him, tattling an exposure of the plot, Echford Flagg, if her well-grounded estimate of his character were correct, might repudiate her as a mere tale-bearer; she remembered enough to know that he was a square fighter. She felt that she had some of the Flagg spirit of that sort in her. She had been fighting her battle with the world without asking odds of anybody or seeking favors from her only kin.
She would go north and do her best, for her own, according to the code she had laid down.